Hillis Arnold 1906- 1988

I haven't blogged about a great deaf person in a couple weeks. When I opened my book of talented deaf Americans, it was Hillis Arnold's page. I'm glad. I've looked at his sculptures and read about him a couple times now.

He was born hearing in N. Dakota, then became deaf as an infant due to spinal meningitis. As a young child he enjoyed drawing and showed some skill using colored pencils. His earliest memories of sculpting was after a rainstorm when he made animal shapes out of the mud on his farm.

He was raised orally by his parents who worked with him on vocalization exercises after doing farm chores each day. At the age of 12 his family moved to Minnesota, where he was able to attend the Minneapolis Day School for the Deaf. Then he went to public high school and graduated with honors. From there he earned a B.A. cum laude from the University of Minnesota. Then he received a full scholarship to the Minneapolis School of Fine Arts. Next, he went to the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan and finally the Chicago Institute of Art.

In 1938, Arnold took a professorship at Monticello College in Illinois and remained teaching there for thirty-four years, while working on art commissions. Of teaching he said, "Communication with my students has never been a serious problem. At our first meeting I tell the students that by the end of the first or second week I will be able to read their lips if they move their lips a bit slower, and that they will understand me as they get used to my way of speaking." Arnold received many prestigious awards and recognitions for his work over the years. Most of it had religious themes and can be found in churches throughout the Midwest. Other works are in schools or downtown St. Louis.

Some of his sculptures incorporated deaf themes. "Because I am deaf, I am a better observer." he once said. One of his deaf sculptures called The Learners is a depiction of a mother practicing speech exercises with her deaf child. Another, called Deaf Given A Voice portrays an eye and an arm with moving fingers to represent how Deaf people use both their eyes and hands to communicate. Though Arnold never learned ASL or even fingerspelling, he was an advocate of Total Communication- the concept of using any and every possible means to communicate with a deaf/Deaf child.

Reading over the articles I found and writing this short sketch of his life, I got a sense that Hillis Arnold considered himself an artist first, not D/deaf first. His deafness was part of who he was, but not his main identity. It seems he was too busy teaching and creating sculptures to think much about his deaf experience. Still he acknowledged his deafness in some of his art when appropriate to do so. I like this about him.

Eugene "Silent" Hairston- Boxer

This week I chose Gene "Silent" Hairston for my Deaf Hero profile. He was born in Harlem in 1930, and became deaf from spinal meningitis when he was only twelve months old. As a child he attended a public "deaf" school, then dropped out in order to take care of his younger brothers and sisters. After working at several odd jobs, he decided to try fighting like his boyhood hero Joe Louis.

Each morning for six months he showed up at the Tremont Fighting Club in the Bronx with a note saying he wanted to fight. At first the owners of the club refused to allow him to fight because of his deafness, but they eventually gave in. He fought so well they decided to train him.

As an amateur Hairston quickly moved up the ranks and won two impressive titles: New York Golden Gloves Champion, 137lb Welterweight Open Division; and Chicago Intercity Golden Gloves (147lb.) Welterweight Champion. He lost only one out of sixty-one amateur bouts. Then he started playing professionally. During his professional boxing career he recorded forty-five wins, twenty-four knock-outs, thirteen losses and five draws, and he went up against some of the toughest Middleweights in the world including Jake LaMotta (aka Raging Bull) who beat him only after ten grueling rounds. He became known as second best in the world. He was quite possibly the only one who could have beat Sugar Ray Robinson, but due to eye injury he had to give up boxing at age twenty-two and never got a chance to fight Sugar Ray.

Though he never asked for special accommodations for his deafness, it was because of Gene "Silent" Hairston that boxing arenas added flashing lights to their ring posts. Other boxers also found the flashing lights helpful, so boxing arenas continued to provide these flashing lights long after Hairston left the ring for good.

Great Deaf Talent-- Regina Olson Hughes

So today I’m reading my book called Great Deaf Americans and once again I’m inspired by what so many were able to achieve. Their intelligence, creativity, bravery, and diligence were awesome. It’s so hard to pick just one person to highlight each week.

One point that struck me while reading other deaf blogs this past week however was the negativity surrounding oralism. Deaf people who use “hearing behaviors” or who speak occasionally instead of always communicating in ASL may be accused of not acting deaf by their peers—and this is NOT a compliment.. Read this blog. As someone who is late-deafened I almost always use my voice, though I’m learning ASL. I feel far removed from this oralism debate and can’t comment to the deaf perspective.

But as someone who is neither fully hearing or culturally deaf I will say this-- I do not believe all deaf people can learn to speak or lipread. It is wrong for the hearing to force such high expectations on the deaf. Over the years, the ability to speak among the deaf has wrongly been associated with intelligence level in some cases, which has hurt many highly intelligent deaf people. I want to be clear that the ability to speak and lipread is only related to one’s hearing ability and nothing more. Simply stated, some deaf people hear more than other deaf people. Some are born deaf, while others become deaf during childhood or later, after learning to speak. All of these factors taken into consideration can lead to greater advantages when learning to lipread and speak and also reading and writing abilities.

For example it is a known fact young children benefit from playing language games and being read to long before they begin reading themselves. Early language skills are the foundational building blocks of reading and writing skills. Children who are born deaf are not exposed to English language as young children. If a person becomes deaf after age five, naturally he or she will be at a greater advantage for learning to read, even though he or she did not learn to read before deafness because the language building blocks were put in place.

Then again, the deaf develop other language building blocks related to ASL. No one has ever studied this to my knowledge, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that IQ testing is skewed for the deaf simply because they think and process information differently. My guess is they are all much smarter than we know. Psychologists already understand IQ testing is not as much of a science as it is an art. We’re continually discovering new information about the brain—new ways of measuring intelligence and new types of intelligences. I suspect ASL expands intelligence in ways we have not measured yet. The deaf see our world differently and we would be wise to make the most of their gifts.

Instead we have tried to force them to be oral like square pegs into round holes. This has led to backlash among the deaf —a sort of reverse discrimination where everything “hearing” may be perceived as against deaf culture.

There was a simpler time long ago when deaf people could be oral or non-oral, and there was no rift in the deaf community. It didn’t matter. You simply did what you had to do to get ahead.

Regina Olson Hughes was one such person. She was born in 1895 and died in 1993. Always interested in drawing from the time she was a young child her parents had her tutored privately in art. At age ten she became sick with Scarlet Fever and began losing her hearing. (Another source said a doctor poured oil into her ears when she was a child.) It’s hard to know what caused her progressive hearing loss to start. She was deaf by the time she turned fourteen.

Then she went to Gallaudet for her Bachelor’s and a Masters in art. (Later, because of all her accomplishments she was given and honorary doctorate degree.) Incredibly she was able to speak four languages by lipreading: French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. Most the time she lipread if it wasn’t too important to understand, but if she needed to be sure of details she had people write the words out on paper.

Eventually she took on a job for the State Department as a translator. Then later she worked for the Department of Agriculture as a scientific illustrator. She also took on another job with the Smithsonian’s Department of Botany painting plants. Today her work can be found in plant manuals, on pesticide labels, and in dictionaries, as well as museums and cards.

Deaf Hero Robert Weitbrecht

This past week my belly dancing instructor made the comment, "There's a fine line between erotic and exotic." In dancing, the difference is in how many inches apart you hold your feet while shimmying. Just a few inches can create a completely different look-- alluring and graceful or flaunting and brash.

The debate we've been having in here and on other blogs between "audism" and "deafism" got me thinking about the lines we draw between ourselves as deaf people. Medically speaking there's a fine line between a severe hearing loss and a profound hearing loss. There's a fine line between "hard-of-hearing" and "late-deafened" or "d-deaf." There's a fine line between oral deaf who were born without hearing and late-deafened who were born hearing, then lost most of their hearing. I know several oral "d-deaf" who hear better than me, who also sign better than me and speak well too. It seems to me they are the best off because they speak and sign so well. I envy them. I wish I were fluent in ASL, but I didn't grow up with a profound hearing loss. I am trying to learn.

Part of the reason I blog is to inform hearing people about deaf people. This is why I have Deaf Hero Day each week. Today's hero is deaf physicist, Robert H. Weitbrecht who invented the coupler for the TTY. Born deaf on April 11, 1920 in Orange, California, Weitbrecht was tutored in speechreading-- the prevailing method of deaf education at that time. He did not learn ASL until he was an adult. Because of his hard work, deaf people were able to communicate with each other by phone.

To read more about Weitbrecht, click on his name.

Good Deaf Reads

Last week while digging through a pile of old books I came across a great mystery I'd read long ago called A Maiden's Grave by Jeffrey Deaver. It was about two kidnappers who held a school bus full of young girls and their teachers hostage in an abandoned meat factory. The twist; the captives turned out to be deaf. What the kidnappers didn't count on was the trouble they would encounter controlling their victims due to the deaf girls' ability to speak silently to each other in ASL when their captors weren't looking. Oh this was a GREAT read! Another fun book I enjoyed a couple years ago was, If You Could Hear What I See, written by deaf comedian Kathy Buckley about her childhood. Then I remembered an informative biography I read about Thomas Gallaudet way back when I was a kid called Gallaudet, Friend of the deaf. This was an old, old biography written for children published in 1964, but was really quite good, though I'm not even sure it's available anymore. Occasionally I pick up a great "deaf" read. Flipping through the pages of some of my favorite books gave me the idea it might be fun to compile a list of good reads about deaf/hard-of-hearing people, their culture and history.

So I've done just that. I have only read the top two on this list, but I plan to read the rest. If you know of a good book or biography involving a deaf character or a great "deaf" non-fiction read, send me the title and author, and I'll add it to my list. I plan to place this list on the right side of my blog too, and separate the books by genre.

1. A Maiden's Grave by Jeffrey Deaver
2. If You Could Hear What I See by Kathy Buckley
3. Silence is Golden: A Connor Westphal Mystery by Penny Warner
4. Deafening by Frances Itani
5. The Story of My Life by Helen Keller
6. Through Deaf Eyes: A Photographic History Of An American Community
7. Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary Deafness On Martha's Vineyard by Nora Ellen Groce
8. In Silence: Growing Up Hearing In A Deaf World by Ruth Sidransky
9. The Tailor's Daughter by Janice Graham
10. Hurt Go Happy by Ginny Rorby
11. MindField by John F Egbert
12. Talk Talk by T. Coraghessan Boyle
13. Deaf Women's Lives: Three Self- Portraits
14. She Doesn't Look Deaf by Corinne Cheatham
15. Deaf In Delhi by Madan Vasishta

If you know of a book, send the title to me, and I'll add it!